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Aspects
Summary Aspects are the result of the human genome being spontaneously and uncontrollably overridden by the Nanite Ecology that otherwise symbiotically co-exists within the New Terran body. They are often utilized as a means to work around the Anactora ban on AI as part of the Alaris Accord, serving as the personality, mascot, and intelligence behind a starship's myriad functions. Zoyana Suxn and Shikumi Midori Nai are prominent Aspects that feature in the Seven Suns storyline, and they heavily influence Shadow Star Lore. Origins Aspects have had virtually all of the carbon-based biology in their cells replaced by synthetic "Hard Tech." Considered a disease by some, an Aspect's physiology undergoes an agonizing and deeply penetrating transformation that lasts from young adulthood into their thirties, which without medical intervention almost universally results in loss of bodily function and eventually, death. Some wind up with their bodies having fused into grotesque statues. Others begin suffering a vegetative state or paralysis, which allows the victim to process multiple threads of complex calculations hundreds of times beyond the biological limits of stress, but no longer be able to control their bodies, trapped in a kind of bodily prison. Enough of the process is understood that it can largely be aborted by introducing counter-nanites into the victim's body from a compatible doner, much like a white blood cell transfusion would act in an Ancient Human body. While this won't completely restore their previous quality of life, it will stop the process from advancing. Abstract thought almost becomes alien to them. When fully realized Aspects try to talk to people they have to "slow down" versus sending light impulses in machine binary. They don't really "talk" as much as they "act." They think in explicit physical simulations rather than representational chemistry, which for those of us still carbon based and shaped by organic chemistry is exceedingly difficult to grasp. This paired down way of thinking allows for blistering high speeds of relativistic and causative logic, but removes the emotional connotations to these things. Because of this morality and ethics mean almost nothing to them, though some have developed a practical-rational basis for doing no harm and attempting to recognize and respect the feelings of others. Some say that Aspects are the bridge between New Terrans and the gods, which is where the name "Aspect" originates. They are human-like aspects of a god-machine's mind. The Serin believe Anax intends one day to allow them to evolve so they are all born as Aspects, like their patron saint Gai'lin, or Kali-Kadai. Whether that is true or not remains to be seen, but the Serin view of Aspects as godlike objects of worship has led to some cult-like appeal surrounding them in their culture that the Mexam, Torlan, and Lantus don't emulate. Members of every race have Aspect Genomes written into their Nanite Ecology that express themselves in various ways, like the Fluid Exchange Ports and Vacuum Resistance that New Terrans experience when exposed to space their first time. But only one in a million children will initiate the full blown condition. This has led some to speculate that the Forerunners intentionally planned these beings to occur naturally, and the unfortunate diseases it can cause are simply "glitches" that are sometimes encountered based on the physics of the process itself. The Serin, Lantus, and Mexam all have various stages of Nanite activity in their bodies. The Mexam being born fully organic with dormant Nanites, where the Lantus and Serin have systems that express along with life stages. The Torlan however are born with active Nanite adaptations already formed, being able to interface with a data terminal by age 6 and lock onto a starship's Spinal Anchor by age 16. The Torlan also experience more Aspect Diseases and full blow conversions four times higher than other races, 1:250,000 as opposed to one in a million. Aspects cannot make babies thanks to their reproductive biology being gutted by the transformation, and it is argued that they are a kind of genetic dead end. The individual gains an innate worldview shaped by their comprehension of physics, capable of processing magnitudes more simultaneous data than a single human mind, but yet they are rendered sterile, and they succumb to a kind of autism, losing the ability to think abstractly or empathize outside of action and consequence. Some go so far as to say they're not even alive anymore, they're instead like a sophisticated machine. This has led Aspects to be treated like tools rather than people. Most don't object simply because they are unaware of the distinction between man and machine anymore and accept their role. Others go rouge and prefer to live in isolation, trying to unlock Forerunner Tech and comprehend the science of the universe. Some would rather kill themselves than live as government property aboard a starship, leaving behind their human life and family. While beautiful, they are also tragic. This has inspired as much art as research along the various races, who struggle to accept them as much as comprehend what they are. Physiology Every New Terran has a Nanite Ecology genetically tied to their carbon based DNA. The Nanites are molecularly programmed with a quadrinary helix structure of ceramic and silicate synthetic-proteins. These Nanites are not coherent microbes so much as they are self replicating a-biotic molecules, much like a biological virus. This virus, however, is physically attached to the DNA of the New Terran, and expresses bio-mechanical structures that grow and mature with a person from the embryonic stage through adulthood. The Nanite ecology serves as the basis for inheritable cybernetic traits, helping adapt a body to life in space or interface with machinery. It also serves as an immune system, protecting against mutant and parasitic Nanite life forms that may have co-evolved with New Terrans across the stars. However, in an Aspect, this Nanite Ecology goes awry, taking over the DNA structures that normally extrude proteins instead supplant their carbon based behaviors with mechanical replicas. This turns the human body into a gradually more and more robotic organism, eventually being entirely replaced with silicate and ceramic machinery entirely. The wildly adapted Aspect body no longer requires normal oxygen respiration, able to draw oxygen from solids as well as gasses, basically breathing glass and calcium carbonate. Their blood and soft tissues, a major liability in the extremes of space travel, are replaced with synthetic fluid conduits for nutrients and electron conductors. They no longer eat carbon based food, instead consuming highly volatile electrolyte fuels that are required for their dense free electrons. Because of this transformation an Aspect can stay conscious and healthy under extremes of pressures that would liquefy their former human bodies. They can survive hard acceleration and extreme gravity, high heat and deep cold. This extremophile tolerance alone makes an Aspect a valuable crew member aboard a starship, but it is what happens to their nervous system and brain that really sets them apart. Should a young Aspect be recruited by a Military, Corporation, or Religious Sect, they can embrace the process and allow their brain and organs to be burned away and converted fully. The dehydrated and shrunken brain becomes a kind of Solid State Replica of the original mind, cloned neuron for neuron, containing all the memories and personality traits of the original biological source. The interstitial tissues of the brain are filled with thermal conducting channels and shock absorbing materials, making up the bulk of their cranium. The resulting brain can undergo extremes of environmental pressures, accelerating without fear of gas bubbles forming in the now absent bloodstream or losing manual control of a ship's systems when rendered unable to manually manipulate them with their hands. An Aspect's mind can wirelessly interface with the ship's systems as if the ship were their own body. They adapt new neural structures allowing them to begin seeing the stars in the full range of light's spectrum, memorizing the constellations from millions of angles and exposures, and able to feel gravity or taste chemistry. The ship's engines flex like their arms, its guns and missiles acting like fingertips. They feel the crew walking about the decks on their bones, and sense the regulation of power as if it were their own beating heart... but they feel these in ways organic people can't begin to comprehend, as they lack the organs to even begin to process it. They do all of this while multi-tasking possibly millions of ship functions and calculating the most optimal way to serve their Commander's orders with human intuition behind it. This processing power requires an extremely dense amount of fuel to be spent to supply their electron hungry brain, and because of this they are slaves to the ship's stores and must physically remain tied to it to access their most potent abilities. They have a kind of "stomach,"which is more of a battery, and in the absence of fat store solid ion rich powders in their skeletal frame, allowing them several hours of freedom if needed. But they are generally trapped within the confines of their ship or else they will starve, only able to draw energy from refined electron sources (like electrical outlets) or by re-hydrating their stored calorics with water and pure lithium. Aspects have no fear of being in a vacuum totally naked. They do breathe oxygen, but instead burn it for fuel along with Calorics, storing it bound to silicon for later use in case they run out of air. They can function like this if fully fueled for decades so long as they conserve to a minimum level of processing power. Or they can last hours operating at full capacity without drinking the slurry of dense electrons and proteins that make up Caloric +10 Fluids. Atmospheric Oxygen is just a stop gap so they can maintain normal operating conditions without the need to refuel from the ship's stores. Additionally, they have no need of bathroom breaks, only a rare flushing of spent fuel from their Caloric Exchange Ports, and they never sleep, having no need to fully disable their processors except for maintenance after enduring protracted periods of high stress. It is not rare for an Aspect to "swap bodies" as easily as some might change a set of clothes. They do this for a myriad of reasons, but Torlan Marine Armours do it so they can engage in one-person starship wrecking crews immune to extremes of acceleration and temperatures. They can also use this system to "resurrect" an endless number of times until their brain is somehow shattered. The major downside to this transformation is a sacrifice of one's apparent humanity, and the emotional costs that brings. Psychology The brain's physiological makeup may readily adapt to the Hard Tech life, but their Wet Tech instincts are still fully present. Aspects experience the full range of human emotion. They mourn the loss of loved ones, physical intimacy, and the joy of eating and drinking, but find themselves unable to outwardly express it. Because they never sleep and they are always working, their sometimes violent emotional traumas can often become buried and ignored for years, especially since their crew often don't see them as being human. Aspects are mentally divorced from representational and abstract thought, because their augmented brains can act on 1 to 1 simulations of reality with near perfect replication of their sensory environment. The human brain can't hope to compare, as neural-biology has to rely on such broad representational strokes to simulate limited awareness and understanding of the deterministic physics behind events. The obvious benefits to this way of seeing the world are limitless, but the drawbacks are equally profound. It is not uncommon for Aspects to personally witness the deaths of their entire crew on starship wrecks or in combat, and because of their brain's density exceeding that of diamond, they are also often the sole survivors. Once their bodies are rebuilt and their brain installed in the replacement, they remember everything, in detail far beyond any natural human memory, as if they can go back to relive it down to every particle's trajectory as their friends lost their lives. And then they step onto the bridge of another vessel, still seeing their faces flashing in their mind. Worse yet, many Aspects report a personal sense of emotional detachment, as if they have become unconscious and are simply living on auto-pilot. They're consciously aware of everything they are doing simultaneously, but it still feels transient, as if it's a dream. Aspects can store their physical memory on a ship's data core, allowing them to "clone" their mind and use it as a backup in case they need to dump their currently full cerebral storage for another task. They can then retrieve that data later, as their brain files the location of the memory rather than the memory itself, which isn't so much different than how a human brain uses the internet. But if that data core is lost, it can take with it all of their original memories too, which emotionally traumatized Aspects often choose to do in order to spare themselves the overwhelming grief of having lost a past crew or even their own past lives as organic people. When Aspects meet they can often psychically transport one another into a common Data Core Server and interface this way. It is rare for Aspects to relate to anyone, so it is very refreshing to meet another like them and spend quality time together. But it can also lead to a battle of wills should the Aspect be from an opposing or hostile faction. It is said that an Aspect sees time differently as well, since the "oscillation rate" of their brain's chemistry is conducted with entangled photons in a solid state block rather than chemistry in a wet neuron bundle. A single second that a human enjoys fully oblivious to the millions of threads of information around them, to an Aspect each and every stimuli are fully present realities they are consciously aware of as they unfold. But should an Aspect sacrifice that multi-tasking potential to dedicate to just one locus of attention, they would be recording and perceiving memories at such a high transcription rate that they could perceive the motion of a beam of light crossing a room inch by inch. Time to their perception would practically stop. The reflexes of an Aspect's body are obscenely fast, capable of reacting to dozens of changing variables at once to choose an optimal path through a situation, exploring multiple vectors in anticipation. They can even intuitively anticipate human reactions since they are themselves human. When an Aspect makes a mistake then, it is taken deeply personally. Often when they are simply distracted or heavily focused on a task, they may miss some social detail that results in a political accident or lapse of character judgement. This crippling self-doubt and sometimes lack of confidence comes down to the individual Aspect to solve, often relating to their crew for support. This is why an Aspect alone on a ship can perform perfectly fine, but it isn't until their crew and commanders are present that an Aspect feels likely they have purpose and assurance. They don't need to write anything down, they can just remember; and remember more per second than most people will forget in a lifetime. No one could understand what they wrote anyway, so they prefer "talking" in their wordless language to other Aspects. An Aspect that ends up alone is prone to savage depression, endeavoring to complete their mission and save their crew above all else, and return home as soon as possible. It isn't that an Aspect can't feel emotions or empathy. It's that they feel them so profoundly that they can't relate them in a meaningful way to others who physically lack the organs to comprehend it all. Retirement When as Aspect returns home they can go through a process of retirement. If they were lucky and experienced a controlled transformation, their original flesh and blood body was likely salvaged and restored, waiting in storage until they return. The Aspect's brain is permanently trapped as a Solid-State Drive, but if their original memories survived their career, this human brain can be surgically detached from the expanded systems that filled their cranium and this solid copy of their mind can be re-established in their original body. They will awake a restored human being, oblivious to the fact that they are still technically a machine upstairs. Most of the memories of what starlight felt like on their skin as they mated their nerves to the ship's hull will be absent, felt as a distant recollection of the image of it, but never quite there. Like something you can reach for only to find it's not really real and cant remember what it was you were looking for. That's because the parts of their augmented brain were borrowing the ship's processors, just like having more cerebral sections. Once it's gone, it's literally incomprehensible and beyond imagining, because the physical systems that simulate them are gone. They can if circumstances calls for it have the Solid State Brain amputated and transplanted back into their Aspect body, but barring that procedure they will never become an Aspect again. The Nanites that once took over are now exhausted and disabled. Most retired Aspects have a relatively easy time reintegrating into their former lives if they served a short career, but they run into the problem of being cerebrally immortal. Their bodies age at the normal rate of natural decay, which for New Terrans can take millennia under the right circumstances, but they can break bones and feel pain unlike they did as an Aspect. They will sometimes even reach for a ship's system as if to order the Heinlein Filaments to bring them a glass of water from across the room, only to realize that their outstretched hand has no will beyond their skull. It's like transitioning from godhood to being mortal in everything but mind. Additionally, an Aspect can sometimes serve for hundreds of years abroad with their ships. By the time they come home generations have passed. Not only is it unlikely their old home still exists, but their friends, families, children -- even their pets, their culture, and social standing have likely been displaced by several iterations. Pop-culture no longer makes sense, language has adapted, and ideas that they once held dear to their identity are now anachronistic. It'd be like a man from the Roman Era returning home to Italy in the 21st Century with no way back. But when they look up at the stars, suddenly they're home again. They may not be the same person they were, time may have passed them by... but there they are. Shining in the sky innumerable. Their constant light guiding them home.